


Hamster House

by De_Nugis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-29
Updated: 2010-06-29
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:45:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p> Sam and Dean undertake a routine hunt right after their disastrous trip to heaven; it entails hamster-care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hamster House

**Author's Note:**

>  written for a prompt from [](http://maychorian.livejournal.com/profile)[ **maychorian**](http://maychorian.livejournal.com/)  for her [birthday comment-meme](http://maychorian.livejournal.com/237467.html).  She wanted anything with hamsters.

Dean’s going to say Yes. Sam’s known since he scooped the amulet out of the trash, useless fucking gesture, and hurried out to the car after his brother, years too late. Save the world, destroy himself, punish Sam: that’s not a trifecta Dean’s going to resist right now. Nothing Sam can think of to do or say that won’t make things worse. All he has are delaying tactics.

Which is why they’re in a gingerbready Victorian house in upstate New York, working a routine haunting. It’s a place to lie low in case more hunters are after them, something to do one step up from twiddling their thumbs. The ghost goes after adolescent girls. The homeowner has packed herself off to a hotel with her daughter, leaving Sam and Dean to work on site. Not that Dean’s working. He’d dug up the grave and burned the bones in a silence colder and heavier than the graveyard dirt, but when that didn’t do the trick he’d just stopped. Now he drinks, passes out for a couple of hours – the only sleep he gets, as far as Sam can tell – and stares at a television he’s never bothered to switch from the channel it was on when they arrived. He and Sam share the space like roommates who don’t much like each other.

Sam doesn’t really need help, not on this one. It’s a matter of going through two centuries of junk, trying to find whatever object is holding the spirit. Two long days of dust and stomach-churning tedium and Sam’s itching to just torch the house, screw the family whose lives and assets are tied up in it. But it’s not like he has any other place to be. He continues sorting methodically through drawers and cedar trunks and cardboard boxes. Dean’s somewhere downstairs. Sam can’t hear the TV. He’s probably most of the way through a bottle. Or maybe he’s watching the hamster run on his wheel.

Their ghost-busting gigs don’t usually come with hamster-sitting. But when they’d carried their bags into the house they’d found a cage in the corner of the living room with a printed sheet of instructions ending in a handwritten “Thank You, he’s Elizabeth’s, she hates leaving him behind.” Sam doesn’t exactly bond with the hamster, which sleeps most of the day and seems frankly kind of boring, not like a dog, but he guesses he can see how a 12-year-old might be attached to him. He’s a natty black and white, and his stubby tail and tiny paws are pretty cute. Dean may not be up for working a job with Sam, but he seems willing to put pellets in the creature’s bowl once a day, refill the little drip water bottle, and supervise the exercise sessions in which the hamster rolls around the living room in a weird plastic sphere that looks like a miniature purple Death Star. It’s an indication Dean’s not totally signed off from the world, and Sam’s grateful, even if it’s to a rodent.

At seven Sam’s had enough dust for the day. He goes downstairs and sticks his head into the kitchen. “I’m going to the store, want anything?” he asks Dean’s slumped back at the table. Sam can’t see if there’s a glass in front of him, or just the bottle.

“No,” says Dean, just like last night and the night before, and Sam turns to go. He’ll get a sandwich for Dean anyway, and maybe in the morning a few bites of it will be gone. But then Dean turns around before he can walk away and says, “Wait. Pick up some fresh stuff for the hamster, will you? The book says they should have treats, not just the dry food.” He looks terrible, red-eyed and seedy, but God, he’s talking to Sam. And holding up a little, glossy book: _Enjoy Your Hamster_.

“Yeah, OK, what does he eat?” says Sam, concealing his surprise.

“Nuts, fruit, veggies. This guy claims they like blueberries. Just don’t get almonds, they’re poisonous for them,” and Dean sounds anxious.

Sam hesitates, nods, grabs his wallet and the car keys. “Remember, no almonds,” Dean calls after him as he heads out the door, and Sam catches himself smiling as he gets into the car. His brother treating him like an idiot who’s about to screw up in some human, forgivable way, like scratching the car or buying almonds for the hamster, warms some pathetic corner of his mind. It sure beats the flat look that isn’t worry any more, just certainty: Sam’s going to fail, walk away for good, say yes to Lucifer, destroy the world.

Sam gets carrot sticks, walnuts, and blueberries. The hamster seems to like them. But apparently Sam’s offerings aren’t quite good enough. The third day there’s an empty little yellow bag from Petco next to Dean’s usual paper bag from the liquor store, and the food bowl in the cage has been supplemented by a kind of granola bar thing attached to the wires. One corner is already gnawed away.

That night Sam wakes up from a dream. Lucifer was bending over a banker’s box full of folders, putting away a blood-smeared piece of paper in a neat file. “You see, I don’t need your consent now, I already have it,” he’d said in that compassionate, plausible voice. Sam’s heart is thudding, the sheets white as paper in the light of the streetlamp outside. His mouth tastes like blood. He sits up, bends his head between his knees for a few moments while his stomach subsides, then pads quietly down towards the kitchen in his bare feet. He needs coffee, needs the bitter, real taste, can’t risk sleeping and dreaming again. But he stops at the living room door. There’s a weird noise coming from in there, a hollow sound punctuated by little, dull thuds, and it takes him a moment to process that it’s the hamster ball. Then he hears Dean.

“You have failed me for the last time,” Dean is saying, but his voice is all weird, high-pitched and squeaky. He follows up the words with a breathy exhale like a steam iron. Darth Hamster. Dean is sitting in the dark in someone’s living room at three in the morning, doing a Darth Hamster voice. Sam retreats noiselessly upstairs, grinning like an idiot. He’s feeling a jolt of some strong emotion he can’t quite recognize, but he knows he can get back to sleep now after all.

The fourth day Sam finds a locket. One side holds a sepia miniature of a listless girl in a high-necked dress, Catharine Wintersmith, 1890-1905. The other side holds a tuft of red hair behind glass. Sam breaks the glass, burns the hair in the sink with a pinch of salt, and runs the EMF detector over the house. Clear. That’s it. Time to move on.

They grab a quick breakfast the fifth morning before setting off. Sam eats, at any rate, and Dean’s at least sitting at the table with him and drinking coffee. His expression is as closed as ever, and the circles under his eyes are so dark he looks like he’s been in a fistfight, but he’s still there.

Halfway through his bowl of cornflakes something catches Sam’s eye. Dean’s shirt pocket is moving. A whiskered black face peeks out over the fabric, and the hamster’s nose quivers at Sam from across the table. Dean’s face comes alive so abruptly it’s startling. He curls one hand protectively around the pocket to keep the hamster from a suicide dive, and with the other he snags one of the blueberries from Sam’s cereal and offers it with a little chirruping sound. He waits till the hamster finishes the snack and then gets up carefully, hand still curved over the pocket, to carry him back to his cage.

Sam feels that jolt again, and this time he recognizes it. Hope. Dean’s still in there. Sam may never get him back, but he’s not letting him go.

 **Epilogue:**

The elaborate two-cage system with connecting tubing had seemed like such a good idea. It totally looked like something Dean would want to live in if he, like, shrank, which probably meant the hamster would also enjoy it. And if the kid at the pet shop could assemble and disassemble it with a twist of the wrist it shouldn’t pose a challenge to Sam Winchester, deadly hunter and Stanford scholar. It’s not rocket science. But it’s also not working. Something seems to be backwards.

Sam studies the picture on the box once more. The tubing does look like it should be connecting airlocks through a vacuum. Maybe it _is_ rocket science. Don’t they take mice and things on the space shuttle? They’ve probably bred a race of superintelligent astrohamsters. That’s going to be pretty scary, teamed up with Dean. He peers through the holes in the carrier. The beady, knowing stare he gets back does nothing to reassure him. “I’m going to regret this,” he mutters, and unscrews two sections of tubing to put them back together the other way. It had better work this time. He still has a pink mini-Death Star to wrap.

Dean comes clattering through the door at six. The first six months they lived here he’d crept in like a housebreaker, like he didn’t belong. But then he’d returned buzzed with success from their fifth post-settling hunting trip – they’d saved a kid and he’d gotten to burn down a barn -- dropped the car keys in a discordant jangle on the table by the door, kicked off his boots so hard one thumped against the wall, and never looked back. Sam has the smudges on the wall to prove it.

“Happy birthday to me. What did you get me, bitch?” he asks now, coming into the kitchen and depositing a slightly greasy paper bag on the table next to the traditional birthday pie. The barbecue place down the road has wooed Dean away from cheeseburgers. He proposes to the proprietor, Miss Rose, at least once a week, and Sam sometimes finds himself sketching plans for how they’ll remodel the house if she ever says yes. She’s sixty if she’s a day, but she’s the first being Sam’s seen Dean regard with genuine awe.

The question’s rhetorical; they usually skip birthday presents. Both of them still alive and the world still standing makes any other gift anticlimactic. And they have the house, the life here they’re gradually giving each other. But thirty-five deserves something. And anyway, Sam’s been wanting to do this for a long time. “It’s in your room,” he says.

At the moment the hamster is nothing but a faint stir of breath under a mound of wood shavings and cotton rags in the corner of the cage. But Dean makes the chirruping noise Sam remembers from four years ago, and after a few moments the wood shavings quake and fall away and a narrow tan and white face emerges. She’s blinking sleepily, but her nose twitches at the new scent and her ears swivel curiously towards Dean. Sam passes Dean one of the blueberries he foresightedly stowed in his pocket, and Dean says “Thanks,” absently without turning his head, like he expects Sam to produce blueberries when required just like he counts on him to pass salt rounds on the job. The hamster advances cautiously to the bars when Dean holds it out. She stands on her hind legs to sniff at it, then takes it delicately in her front paws and begins to nibble.

“Hey, there,” Dean says softly, crooking a finger through the bars to stroke gently along her cheek. Then “Thanks, Sammy,” and as he turns his head Sam catches the last of a goopy smile transitioning into a blinding Dean grin. It’s maybe the best expression Sam’s ever seen.


End file.
